How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work
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“Here is the_you asked for, Mr. Jackson.” (Translation: I
stayed until nine-freaking-o’clock to do this.) It’s a matter of actively taking notes during meetings instead of sitting there with your hands folded. Filing is a controversial subject. Some contend that if you’re too meticulous, then it looks like you’ve got nothing better to do, while others maintain that “people know it takes time to keep all that stuff straight,” and so files are a relatively easy way to communicate diligence. Sometimes it simply helps to walk briskly down the hall, brow furrowed and papers tucked purposefully under the arm, instead of strolling like it’s Sunday in the park. As Overstreet put it, “We influence very largely in ways far more subtle than we suspect.” Gestures that sound banal can be surprisingly persuasive.
At the height of his fame, Carnegie held meetings that brought enough success-seekers, sitting on the edge of their folding chairs, to fill up hotel ballrooms. Not many underlings read it now, being largely unable to imagine that How to Win Friends and Influence People offers anything that’s not already widely known. Carnegie, facing similar criticism in his own day, readily admitted he wasn’t an original. “Of course I deal with the obvious,” he said. “I present, reiterate, and glorify the obvious—because the obvious is what people need to be told.” In that spirit, here are some other hoary no-brainers for navigating institutional self-absorption:
Do tell the people you like that you like them. Upon receipt of the one-hundred-thousandth copy of his book, Carnegie wrote his Jewish editor, Leon Shimkin, to express his appreciation. “Every morning I arise and face the East and thank Allah that you came into my life,” he wrote. Which is thoughtful, but not “nice.” If your assurances and thank-yous are too vague and too bland, you’ll be indistinguishable from the greeter at The Gap.
Also watch out when people don’t give you this same assurance. If they plain don’t like you, or simply don’t plan to lift a finger in service of your career, it will be clear in these ways:
1. They will have a hard time smiling at you. (Forced American smiles are easy to spot. The lips get pulled back too far or too high, while the eyes stay flat, and the effect is altogether disconcerting. It’s been called the Pan American smile, after the stewardesses of the now defunct airline.)
2. They will not enthusiastically share information with you.
3. They will drop comments into conversation that deflate your own sense of importance. An example from How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: You mention you discovered a great new restaurant in New Orleans; they say, oh sure, we ate there just last year, and yeah, cute little place.
Do figure out who the mentors ore. A hint: They will not be the going-insane-in-order-to-feel-important types. Jason, a publicist, once worked for a woman who had a habit of announcing, generally during meetings but on other, less formal occasions as well, that she had the largest penis of all assembled. Her exact words: “I’ve got the biggest dick in this room.” Anyone who speaks like this is not likely to be the best advocate for her employees, however they are endowed.
Those who do enjoy giving underlings a helping hand generally show it in these ways:
1. They will ask you what you’re working on. Not as a challenge, or out of charity (making a feeble attempt to appear interested), but because they’re generally curious about what you’re going to say.
2. They will bring items to your attention that they think might help you out—connections, articles, job opportunities, and the like.
3. They will be very frank with you. Which is to say, they won’t waste your time or their own with too-generous appraisals of your work or future prospects.
Do use people’s names. This is one of Carnegie’s simplest and most ingenious prescriptions. People just like seeing their name; Carnegie suggested it’s why the rich gave money to museums and art galleries—they loved having their name in gold leaf, in capital letters, up on the wall for everyone to see.
The corollary is that failing to recognize somebody can be incredibly, irrationally maddening to him or her. (“You know the type, you’ve been introduced to her on three previous occasions, you have a couple of mutual friends, and you bump into her, and she extends her hand for a handshake and gives her name, as though for the first time—and the thing is, you know what her name is, where she works, and on what occasion you last saw her, and the length of her last romantic relationship. It’s infuriating.”)
The corollary to the corollary is that if you’re guilty of this kind of blanking, you should send an e-mail the next day and express (1) mild embarrassment, and (2) interest in whatever life projects she’s got going on at the moment. Even if it seems forced, you’ve made the effort.
Do dose with a snap. Another, often ignored, implication of the self-absorption standard is that people mostly want you to stop talking. Carnegie was no friend to the windbag, precisely because the windbag neglected the other person’s desire to talk.
Overstreet wrote in Influencing Human Behavior that any speaker who kept promising to wrap things up but didn’t was shooting himself in the foot. He also suggested that, if at all possible, you let your audience see the pages you’re speaking from dwindle in number (that is, you wouldn’t shuffle the page you’d just finished to the back of the stack, but instead create a discard pile). This gave people a satisfying way to gauge how much longer you’d be droning on.
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A final note concerning a bizarre coincidence I only discovered after flipping through How to Win Friends and Influence People for the third time, alone late at night, with a laptop and Internet connection nearby. I was going through the revised edition that came out in 1981, which added new material vetted by Dorothy Carnegie, Dale’s widow. (He died in 1955.) The result is a book that blends stories of the Taft administration with anecdotes about Stevie Wonder’s childhood. One new quote worked into the text was from a Professor James V. McConnell. It’s about smiling, and McConnell’s point is that “there’s far more information in a smile than a frown.” It so happens that James V. McConnell was targeted by the Unabomber in 1985. He wasn’t killed in the attack, but he did suffer some hearing loss. The only meaningful link between McConnell and Ted Kaczynski, as far as investigators could tell, was the University of Michigan, where McConnell taught and where Kaczynski received his PhD. There was no clear motive. Several years later, in 1994, when another of Kaczynski’s mail bombs killed an advertising executive, a letter sent on the occasion tried to justify the murder by saying that the PR industry was guilty of manipulating people—a very bad thing, in his mind.
Carnegie would undoubtedly have added the Unabomber to his list of people who’d go insane in order to feel important. He had no delusions about the extent to which a person could be criminally self-involved. Nor did he have much truck with cowards; when combined revenue from the book and Dale Carnegie Training courses (now franchised in over sixty-five countries) had made him a rich man, he remarked that his making a living from teaching public speaking was incidental: what he had really set out to do was help people develop courage. Not least because, in his mind, “a rabbit-hearted coward invites disaster.” Or, sometimes, less dramatically, rabbit-hearted cowards just wasted a lot of time. Too timid to confront other people’s navel-gazing, they ended up sniffing around for recognition in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways. Over time, it led to passivity; they doubted their ability to influence others and so stopped trying. And then not a whole lot got accomplished. Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fairly reliable way to make sure no one gets promoted.
5
The Master Mind
* * *
Napoleon Hill on the Proper
Use of Friendship
We flounder about making empty, vapid, pleasing
remarks and before we know it we have another
“friend” and have invited him to lunch “some day.”
—IRVING TRESSLER,
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
>
WHEN I WENT to the vast New York Public Library to read up on Napoleon Hill—the “Billy Sunday of Business Evangelism”—I came up empty. His How to Raise Your Own Salary—cataloged as missing. The Law of Success, both the 1928 and the 1965 editions—gone. Think Your Way to Wealth, Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude, and How to Sell Your Way Through Life, ditto. Missing too were The Master-Key to Riches and the library’s two copies of Hill’s signature title, Think and Grow Rich, which came out in 1937. This confirmed an initial suspicion I had about Hill and his followers: they’re the kind of slick idiots who try to kick-start their fortune hunt by stealing from a public library.
In the canon of success literature, Napoleon Hill stands over to the seedier “motivational products” side. His prose, for one, has a late-night infomercial tone to it.25 His life story is marked by relationships left in tatters and business ventures gone bust. He once sicced the FBI on a former associate who had a German accent, and who was threatening to sue, which led to the man spending much of World War I in a detention center. A native of Blue Ridge Mountains country, Hill practiced such childhood hobbies as rolling boulders down hills and strutting down Main Street with a handgun. He mellowed—a little—when his stepmother persuaded him to trade his six-shooter for a typewriter. Nor was Hill much of a family man; his wife and kids relied on financial assistance from relatives while he traveled around the country in tailored suits and a Rolls-Royce. Of his eventual three marriages, two ended in unmitigated disaster. His son Blair once called him an “ unscrupulous, holier-than-thou, two-timing, double-crossing good-for-nothing.” Hill claimed to have coined the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” during a short stint in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, but nobody has confirmed this story. Too busy preaching about business savvy, Hill neglected to make and keep friends.
Which makes it all the more interesting that Hill’s advice on how to mix friendship and business is among the best available. Blending companionship and money-making has traditionally been seen as an oil spill in the making, for several valid reasons. One, there’s a sense that trading on your connections smacks of retrograde high school cliques and old-boy networks. Then there’s the time-honored American preference for going it alone—Thoreau on Walden Pond, the Lone Ranger, being told that you can do it, and so on. And if mixing friends and career advancement weren’t already fraught, somebody went and dreamed up the greasy term networking, a euphemism that allows us to sound like we’re not talking about what we’re talking about, which is leveraging relationships to make more money. All this has left most of us with the idea that it’s only OK to appreciate people for who they are, uniquely and specially, deep down inside—and that to take into consideration what they can do for you is craven and shallow, possibly evidence of a thoroughly corrupted soul.
In Think and Grow Rich, Hill gently suggests that this purity and high-mindedness is super until you realize how hazardous it is to living well. Using people who like you is nothing to be ashamed of, because, at the end of the day, it’s a cold, cold universe, and it can get rough out there. Would you rather rely on those who don’t like you? Not only should you exploit your friends unapologetically, Hill argued, but you should do it expertly. To this end, he devised a highly specific methodology.
After tossing his ideas around for a while, I began to see how they might help those of us who look up at the ceiling, or pretend we don’t hear, when more outgoing colleagues encourage us to mingle. And I started to suspect that our queasiness over using people might just stem from the fact that most of us simply don’t do it correctly.
Hill’s ideas on friends in business come bundled in a concept he called “the Master Mind.” He defined the Master Mind as “coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose.” Basically, your Master Mind is any group of people you can call on for help, or who might know things you don’t, or whose imagination travels to places yours doesn’t. (His phrasing is confusing, because he referred to it as a singular Master Mind, but he’s at all times referring to a collective entity.)
Hill believed that a Master Mind was behind all the namebrand American fortunes, including those of Andrew Carnegie, William Wrigley (chewing gum), Henry Ford (cars), and John Wanamaker (department stores). But it also operated on smaller scales, and in most entrepreneurial ventures. The important thing to remember, Think and Grow Rich stressed, was that friends were a determining factor in your financial status. The basic idea Hill got from Andrew Carnegie himself, whose four-story, sixty-four-room Fifth Avenue mansion Hill had been dispatched to as a rookie reporter, on behalf of a small outfit called Bob Taylor’s Magazine, in 1908. The question that Hill put to then-retired Carnegie—he’d recently cashed out of U.S.
Steel to the tune of $480 million—was simple: How? How had he done it? Carnegie, it turns out, was more interested in young Hill, who reminded him somewhat of his younger self (they also had coal-mining backgrounds in common). Their meeting was supposed to last three hours, but Carnegie kept him at the mansion for three days, and one evening, over after-dinner cigars, a proposal was cooked up. Carnegie wanted Hill to interview all of America’s great businessmen, catalog everything they had to say about success, and then come up with some usable theories. Some of these men were in Carnegie’s Master Mind—he reckoned about fifty men had at one point or another been in his group. Anyhow, he thought the whole project might take twenty years. He did not offer Hill any compensation—just reimbursement for expenses. At which point Carnegie pulled out a stopwatch to clock Hill’s response time. If he had taken any longer than sixty seconds, Carnegie claimed later, the offer would have been withdrawn (because any man worth his salt knew a good offer when he heard one).26
Hill took twenty-nine seconds to decide yes, and then spent the next twenty years, on and off, quizzing self-made millionaires about their personal habits. He found that all of them relied on meetings with advisors—hardly a news flash. The economic principle was pretty straightforward—two or more brains, working together, can generate more activity than one brain churning away in isolation. Politicians exploited the power of the group, too. FDR had his “Brain Trust,” a group of academics who helped him chew over domestic policy questions. But the Brain Trust never met in person, and quite possibly didn’t even know each other. (The president spoke to them mainly over the phone, one on one.) This is where Hill offers something new, and a little more complex: Your Master Mind group had to meet in person twice a week, with a specific goal in mind, and always in “a spirit of harmony. ” And ideally, if you’d planned things just right, you would be the biggest dimwit in the bunch.
All three elements were vital, but having a clearly defined goal was most important to Hill. He was a stickler for definiteness. “What a different story men would have to tell if only they would adopt a DEFINITE PURPOSE,” he ranted, and what an even better story if while fixating on that purpose, they let themselves teeter on the brink of obsession. Part of this thinking was straight-up New Thought (or as Hill writes: “Our brains become magnetized with the dominating thoughts which we hold in our minds”). Hill wanted his readers to lust after people, and lust after specific people. Besides meeting twice a week, a fully functional Master Mind required that you be very clear on who was going to be part of it, and why you wanted them in the group. You had to pursue relationships with your professional heroes as zealously as you would any romance.
Hill opens Think and Grow Rich with a story about Edwin C. Barnes, a would-be entrepreneur he deemed worth mentioning—repeatedly—because Barnes had a hankering to work with Thomas Edison. And so he hounded Edison. More precisely, he hopped a freight train to East Orange, New Jersey, and showed up on Edison’s doorstep, without connections, without a letter of introduction, without even much in the way of qualifications, and he stood there on the stoop until Edison reluctantly gave him a job. This gambit worked, Hill wrote, because Barnes went to
East Orange with the intention not of asking meekly for a job of some kind, but of putting Edison “on notice” that they’d be doing business together. For Edison’s part, faced with this complete stranger, we’re told he thought something like this: “… there was something in the expression of his face which conveyed the impression that he was determined to get what he had come after… I gave him the opportunity he asked for, because I saw he had made up his mind to stand by until he succeeded.”27
Security guards, reception desks, administrative assistants, human resource departments, and key-card access make this stunt virtually impossible today. Not to mention that if you did try to storm the barriers to reach some high-placed individual, people would start to wonder about your emotional stability. Looking for heroes in the more immediate vicinity of your cubicle rarely brings satisfaction either. It’s difficult to find people who qualify for unchecked admiration in any field, in any office, but it’s much, much more challenging in offices where people aren’t terrifically invested in their jobs. David, an ambivalent New Jersey banker, can walk down J. P. Morgan’s cubicle row without glancing at a single nameplate that makes his heart skip. “My colleagues are bums,” Deanne, a paralegal, told me when explaining why she hadn’t gone to anyone for help with a sticky job quandary. (She’d read through more “actionable” e-mails and IM transcripts than was good for anyone’s soul.)
Part of the problem, of course, is that most corporate settings don’t allow us to pick our own teams. Whom we report to is determined by many things, but the extent to which we admire and respect their skills is usually not taken into consideration. Nor is the extent to which we share goals with them. Be it snark, be it siloed management, be it misguided competition, the fact is that the setup of most offices actively discourages looking at your colleagues as sources of inspiration. The result is a slow, steady erosion of desire.